What are you building?

People keep asking me that, and I realise that I’ve been saying a platform, a health house, a practice, or simply that I want to help people be happier and healthier. But the honest answer is: I don’t know.

Last week I talked about daring to build in sprints. Now I want to go even more into what I find to be a more intuitive and feminine way of building. Meaning, building from intuition and excitement, rather than towards a goal. Our entire society is built around goals: life goals, company goals, health goals, family goals. Or at least my life, and the society around me, has been.

But you know what I’ve realised about goals. They often require a lot of effort, a lot of force. And to what end? Most of the time when we reach a goal we just set a new one.

At least this was how I used to function (and to be fair, sometimes I still fall back into it). I want to start a company, I want to hire someone, I want to earn x amount. We set a goal, a target, and then we work towards that, so that the goal is the focus. But that means we spend most of our lives putting our focus somewhere else than the present.

The last year and a half I’ve been privileged enough to allow myself to become more and more present. Not really having roots or a plan has allowed me to be more focused on where I am than where I am going.

In my case the more recent goals have been trips. I landed back in Piteå for a few months before going to, for example, the Buddhist centre to volunteer, then came back until I went to Thailand for the training. But to be fair, I would still call those trips my goals, because instead of pushing toward a goal, I’ve been passively waiting for the next one. A very similar dynamic except that while I’m on a trip, I get to stay inside the goal longer than if it were just a target that I would hit, maybe celebrate and then on to the next one.

But in these waiting periods I didn’t have a real job. So I had a lot of time to just do what I felt like, and I learned a lot about myself. For example, I like to wake up, stay in that drift between sleeping and awake, and see what comes to me - usually really insightful lessons to reflect on, where my dream state connects with my awake state. Then I would go on to do my daily yoga, and while doing it I would usually get an idea for something I wanted to do that day.

As I am a doer, I would usually manage to act on my ideas during the day. And when I didn’t get an idea, it would most of the time mean that something would come into my life that day that wasn’t mine - a friend calling or visiting, for example.

Doing this has reminded me how we as children kind of just get ideas and act on them. So I’ve been managing to bring this habit into the rest of my life. Like the other day I listened to a podcast, and during it there was a commercial for an apple pie, and I remembered a friend had dropped off apples from her garden, so I just went and made an apple pie.

This, for me, is quality of life. I get to do what I want to do when I want to do it. So I’m not sure what I’m going to build, but I am going to do it like this. I am going to follow my inspiration and my hints, and create in the now instead of building toward a future. Perhaps it will be a new business, a non-profit, a family, a farm, a project, or just helping someone else out. Because finally the journey has become the goal, as so many have said, but I was never really able to implement it until now.

Also, please remind me of this if I forget. ;)